Palette
by Octavius
Summary: We find 2 lost young men in London and then again by the sea. A strange little story in which there is guitar playing, art watching, and lost faces. AU.


Rating: PG-13, if it was a movie I guess….

Disclaimer: Don't own any gundam wing characters or storylines, I am making no money from this. Gundam Wing and all it's charcters belong to Bandai and Sunrise.

Author's notes: I don't really know if the Picadilly line goes west on the London underground. That would be the blue line Heero sees on the subway. There is the occasional pigeon in Paddington Station though. 

Rose-leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the beloved's bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, 

Love itself shall slumber on.

-Shelley, To – (_Music, When Soft Voices Die_)

He first saw him in London. At Paddington Station.  Where the air was cold and a pigeon had flown inside walking crooked through the feet of the passerby. He was frozen by his gaze. Frozen in a way he couldn't understand.  Like clowns showed at the circus, with their foot placed on the ground ready for their next step, but he was not ready, his mind was not ready.  He stared.  His mouth was open and the air that burned it's way back up his throat was hot, and the cold stung your cheeks, his hands went slack in the handles of his bags.  A man picked up an orange that rolled away from him, but he did not see it.  He did not hear the rushing of the train as it took off from the platform, or the click of the pigeon's feet as it rans through his legs, or the panicked rush of it's wings as a child chased it with pudgy fingers. His face was there, he felt he could reach out and touch it, but his fingers were frozen by his sides. 

And the face he sees is like a hundred others, but strange under this painted picture of a face he feels that he has glimpsed something harder, darker wilder than you have ever known. After the gaze has broken and he finds himself alone in the bustling station, with his bags at his feet. He notices and orange is missing. He picks them up and walk home. 

At night he lies awake and remembers that face.  It is like a picture in his mind, a portrait painted by some unknown artists. Like the museums he went to and wondered about the boy.  Who's face had that been? Who had the artist found to pose for him, and he looked deep into their painted eyes and wondered who they were.  To him they are more real than the people he passes on the streets. The train station face had that same quality.  He thinks to himself before he falls asleep that the last brush stoke the painter made had been sadness, a lilt of loneliness in the eyes.  He knows that look.  He sees it every time he looks at himself in the mirror.

As time passes he forgets. He does not remember that face, except when picking out oranges at the grocery store, or when he sees pigeons at Paddington station.  When he does he frowns and goes home early. Then he lies awake on these nights, he can still see the train station face.  The edges have begun to blur.  He does not remember if the nose is a thin bladed as it appears to him now, or if the coat he had been wearing was black or grey, but the eyes are the same.  He always remembers the eyes, and they tear at him, he wonders if he should have said something.  There in that moment, when he had been frozen by him. He does not sleep during these nights, he find it escapes him. It is intangible like water through his fingers.  Instead he gets up, shrugs on a coat and escapes to the bleak streets of London.  

The Art museum is open late.  He sits inside and watches the pictures.  The guards have grown used to him.  They smile sadly at the lonely young man, and move on; lumps of black against the white of the walls. He feels better here.  Perhaps like he has appeased the eyes in the train station face by being among eyes that are like theirs.  Perhaps for a time both their loneliness is forefilled. 

The next day he is almost late for work.

It is three days since his last trip to the Art museum. The coffee leaves a sour taste in his mouth, he vows to go to Starbucks the next day. He looks at the clock and realizes it is time to go. There is the rustling of papers from the cubicles next to his.  He loosens his tie and brushes a hand through his hair.  There is an ache steadily growing up spine, and another that circles his heel. He shrugs his shoulders in annoyance and moves stacks of folders to find his briefcase. 

On the Underground he closes his eyes and tries to forget the face.  He is tired, bone tired.  Like all energy and will to move has been sucked dry from his soul. But the eyes are burned there, he cannot forget them because that would be forgetting himself.  The loneliness eats at him, almost like a tangible being riding his shoulder, its claws biting into his flesh. He does not feel comfortable in this office, it in it's grey walls, and the constricting tie around his neck.  This land of white paper, and manila folders is foreign to him.  The Art museum is his paradise.

When he arrives home there is no one to greet him. In this there is an ache in his heart.  He has seen on TV that people could buy a dog or a cat as a companion, but when he sees them in the stores he does not feel them; only sees them.  They are distant to him, like he stands behind a wall of glass watching, but not touching, never touching. He is like this with many things.  Some he does not understand: he does not understand the woman's obsession with make up, or the man's lust after her, or the whispered conversations by the water cooler, the use of getting drunk, or the false smiles that people shower on each other.  He understands their purpose, what they are meant for, but he has not felt them, the feelings are not something he can relate to. That world is dead to him.  He lies beneath a stream and the waters of society wash over him. 

He does not even pretend that he can sleep. The coat is shrugged on, and he rides the rocking underground along the twisting maze of tunnels.  The chart of their direction becoming a twisting of colored snakes in his vision. Each one rearing a head to stare at him, their eyes are dark, like the tiny black beads the girl next to him wears around her neck, or fragments of the tunnel that surround him.  Some twist north, others south, he follows a blue one west into the setting sun.  The museum welcomes him, they have come to know his face. In the same way students know the person that sits behind them, or the neighbors on the side of a yard.  There is the brief exchange of words and money and he is inside.  The pictures are watching him and he understands their stare.  The soft eyes of the Madonna, and the stuff posture if the medieval saints. The naked shoulder of a boy, and the brush strokes that create the shift of muscle under the skin.  He feels that if he reaches he could feel warmth there, a hard line of bone, a tiny valley at the base of the neck.  But he does not.  Each figure is trapped in their own world, just as he is trapped in his.

When he leaves the night air welcomes him back by trailing cold fingers down his neck. He does not mind and walks to the red and blue Underground sign, past closed shops and empty windows.  It is at a bar he first hears the low strains of the guitar. If music could be the warmth of a fire, these sounds would be it.  They surround him, welcome him, lonely and wild.  He cannot quite describe it, there is an edge to it that escapes him, but he understands.  There is a jingle of bells in the little pub as he enters, that man cleaning the bar with a rag looks up. His bald scalp glimmers in the low light.  But Heero's eyes are not on him.  In the corner a man sits with a guitar across his lap, his head bent over the fine curves of wood. He looks like the hunched statues inside the museum, the marble Greeks and their cold flesh, the roll of their shoulders.  He is like them, this man who sits before him. 

Then there is the turn of head, the light in his hair moving with the twist of the neck. The angle is familiar to him, the curve of the face is familiar to him.  The eyes are the most familiar of all, he sees them in the museum, in himself, in the sleepless nights.  When the man turns to him, and he stares back the air between them is heavy.  Pregnant with words unspoken, words that tremble on the edges of lips.  The recognition is there clear in his eyes.  Heero wants to know what to say.  Then there is the beginnings of a smile, a quickening at the edges of his mouth, like the edges of a flame as it is set to paper. 

Hey, he says.  His fingers are still on the guitar. You play very well you say.  He smiles again, it is an easy movement for him. 

"Thank you." His hands caress the body of the guitar, it lean lines the great hollow body, eager for sound. He bends over it again and then there is music.  His hands are quick over the strings he knows them well.  The guitar is an extension of himself, he is as much it as it is a part of him.  The guitar man has a voice like his notes, soft and sad, in the region of sound that it is easy to be deaf to, but is human and clear.  The little bar echoes with notes. Quick tunes, quick strokes of the strings.  He is caught within them.  This web of notes that the man before him strung.  No he thinks.  No, I was caught before at Paddington station and I don't want to be free.  He sits and listens to the man who plays so well, who pulls him deeper into the tapestry that had begun to be woven at the station in London where the first met.  Yes he thinks, a tapestry to be woven with this man, to become like the pictures in the Art museum in their own world, just as the saints and angels blew their horns for God, and Madonna looks kindly on the Baby Jesus.  Slowly the notes fade drifting on the night winds.  The guitar man's hands are limp over the strings, his head bent over them again like the despairing statues in the museum. He wonders if this man is as cold as them. Their cold shoulders, the dark lines of a shoulder blade he had touched and drawn away from.  The ice of it burning his fingers. 

"Would you like something to eat?" He's looking at him again.  "I," he pauses unsure, but he is infected by the wild, confidence that exudes from this figure, "Sure," he says.  Another smile, there is a great place down the street he tells him, Heero nods and watches the hands set the guitar inside it's case and snap the clips shut. Then one of those hands on his arm, the weight of it through his jacket, wait a sec he says and you nod again.  He slings the case over his shoulder and shouts something through the door where the man at the bar disappeared through. 

"Come on," he says and pulls you through the open door.  

He drinks hot cider in a little café and eats chocolate cake that sticks to the roof of his mouth.  It coats his tongue with sweetness.  The guitar man says his name is Duo.  There is a shake of hands exchanged over the table, and the cake.  He tells Heero he writes his own songs, but loves the Beatles and the fast pace of the Spanish guitar players.  Especially the Spanish guitar playing.  He says it is like a lighting a fire in you're blood.  Duo asks about him.  Heero tells him he can play the piano. He remembers the feel of the keys under his hands.  He does not play the piano in his house, he could go back and play it.  Leave fingerprints in the dust.  The talk turns to art.  There is no mention of Paddington station. Then the plates are empty, the cider gone.  He asks Duo to go with him to the museum, and he agrees.  They both know he would.

He returns a second time to his pictures.  Duo is beside him, they are quiet and comfortable within each other in their own room of silence.  He points out things here and there.  They pass the familiar picture of Madonna and child.  The saints and their golden halos.  They reach the painting of the boy with the bare shoulder.  Duo reaches to touch it, tracing the curves in shadow.  He imagines his breath like each stroke of the painters brush as it conceives that shoulder, and his mouth is open in awe, they are the same.  Short and brief like the painter's movement, feathered at the end fading away, like his breath. 

And now he is like the boy, and Heero is like Duo reaching to touch the shoulder of something beautiful.  Each breath like the painter's brush.  But there is no need, he turns and catches his hand before it can reach his shoulder.  And it is pressed to lips that breathe like the painter's movement.  Hands that play the guitar caressing his own, hard press of teeth against his knuckles, closed eyes.  Cold touch of air as the mouth breaks its kiss.  

The boy in the painting does not move, but the one before him does.  

On the underground there is no exchange of words.  They do not look at each other.  He has not let go of his hand.  

Kisses in a doorway as he fumbles for the keys to his house.  The guitar is left on the couch next to the briefcase.  Coats are shrugged off. His hands are warm.  They leave an imprint of heat over his body.  Hands in his hair and closed eyes.  Hurried breaths and soft sad laughter. The press of bodies, the mingling fire of them.  He kisses a shoulder that is not like the stone of the marble statues, and there is a fire on his lips. A spill of hair over him.  Fingers that trace the rolling hills of his ribcage, and follow the ravine on his chest to the valley at the base of his neck.  Like the painted place he wished to touch, and a kiss here. Eyes that are sad and wonderful too look at.  He has seen a color like this before, the color at sunset before the blue fades to black and the goddess of the night weaves a purple ribbon in her cloak.  

The many colors of the bruise, as it darkens and teeters on the edge of black.  A hand that clenched down on his arm in the last throes of passion.  After words the sheets welcomed them into their arms. There are muttered words against his lips and a waterfall of hair that scatters itself over his pillow.  Strands of it stick to the sweat on his cheek, but he does not remove them. A hand lies on his chest and he picks it up.  There are lines on the guitar that is the grain of the wood.  There are lines in the hands that play them as well.  He traces them with his fingers and kisses the palm.  There is a callus on his index finger from the press of the strings another on his thumb as it curves around the guitar.  He kisses them as well, tasting soap and a trace of the chocolate cake from the restaurant.

He falls asleep like this with a hand on his face and a body next to his.

He does not awake like this.  In the morning the daylight breaks through the windows and the sunlight washes away the night's dreams.  There is no Duo next to him.  The room is empty.  He knows the rest of the house will be empty as well.  Just as he knew that there would be no staying of the man with the guitar.  He knew it the night before when he had reached out to him.  There is no guitar on the sofa.  There is no remnants of Duo, except for the bruises on his shoulder, a strand of hair left on the pillow and the absence of one of his rubber bands.  There is a note on the table, and in a wild artful hand is penned the words _I'm sorry.  He wants to tell him it's ok, the he doesn't need to apologize.  That they can laugh over it later, when he takes him out to dinner.  But there will never be any dinners, or laughs or forgiving.  He feels empty inside like a husk of self with no heart. _

He calls in sick for work that day.

The next day he stops at the pub and asks the man at the bar where he can find Duo.  There is a pause the heavy blinking of eyes from the bartender, a look of unrealization. Duo? Oh Duo.  He laughs.  He tells Heero that Duo is a wanderer, "He wanders in looking for a job. We let him play here.  He'll be back in 6 months or so.  I don't even know his full name, everyone just calls him Duo."  He shakes his head with a bemused smile.   He does not understand the strained edge of panic in Heero's voice; he doesn't see the tremble in his hands.  

He finds he cannot stay in London and keep his sanity.  Everything reminds him of him. He cannot go to the Art museum without thinking of the mouth the ran teeth along his knuckles, he cannot look at the paintings on canvas without thinking of Duo's face and the painted quality of it. He cannot stay in the office.  The gypsy of Duo is in him now, he wants to see the coast to travel and ride in car along black highways. He plays the piano late into the night, until the noise shakes the dust off and onto the floor.  He is melting now, the marble of his character cracking in the heat of Duo's fire and he is growing lighting himself off of Duo's flame.  His fingers crashing down onto the keys.  Within each note he finds clarity, a brief influx of calm.  His neighbors wonder at the sounds.  The guards at the museum look for the lonely man, but he will not be there.  He has become a gypsy, dancing in the moonlight, playing music until dawn, headed for the sea.

He can taste the salt of the ocean.  It tastes like the salt on his shoulder. He has a house by the sea.  With wood floors that let his feet slide.  He likes them, they are empty and clean.  The sand brushes easily out of the door.  In the morning he walks along the beach curling his toes in the sand. The grains grind between his toes.  The sea winds love his hair.  He has let it grow longer than he did in London, but he will never let it grow as long as the strand tucked away with the note in his drawer.  Never that long.  He would not become somebody else.  The days here pass in a calm silence.  The town's folk wonder at the man who lives by the sea and plays the piano.  They hear the notes as the drift over the waves.  He is quiet when he comes into town, but he is kind  and smiles slightly at everyone.  Howard, who runs the grocery store says he is very good mannered. 

They used to send patients to the sea for the air.  Doctors said the air was good, cleaner fresher, he reads.  He believes it.  He is in loves with the sea.  Just as he is in love with Duo, but in a harder simpler way.  The way a child loves the wind.  He finds the air fresher, clearer, cleaner. The waves wash away his sorrows until they are just an ache in his heart.  He draws the seagulls and falls asleep among the dunes, lulled by the waves.  He thinks that Duo's voice was like the waves, it reminds him of it. He goes to sleep at night smelling the sea and remembering what the body next to his felt like.

There are months that pass.  The town's folk are entranced by the distant Heero Yuy.  London seems far away.  Then one evening there is a knock at his door.  Against the ocean and grey sky, there is a figure wearing sunglasses and carrying a guitar case.  

There is a night where an ocean of hair is spread out over a pillow.  Outside there is the rush of the ocean.  Inside there is the whisper of voice in his ear, and hands on his body. Kisses along the plains of his stomach before hitting the cliffs of a ribcage.  A night spent in these arms.

He awakes alone in the morning. The sea is outside. Someone is cooking.  He can smell grease from the kitchen. There are eggs on the table when he makes his way out.  He pauses in the doorways unsure of what to say.  The figure at the stove is frozen to.  He has a sense funny déjà vu from their first meeting at the station.  But now he cannot see his face.

"What's your name?" Heero asks.  

"Duo, Duo Maxwell." He pauses his hands are still over the countertop, then turns around.  "Breakfast?"  There are two plates laid, and Duo Maxwell's eyes are a little sad, a little wild, the painter of his face adds another brush stroke this time one that asks for forgiveness.  Heero nods. The gulls wheel outside the window. 

He asks him to play the piano.  He does.  Pulling the cover away from the keys, spreading his fingers over the black and white and weaving the notes.  He plays the songs he wrote for the sea, and those that he played for it.  His audience of water and waves.  He does not feel the presence of the man next to him.  He can feel him in the song, just as he felt part of himself in the guitar. The notes circle and blend together lonely, soft and slow like the sea, like himself, like the rain in London.  He sits and plays in the little room for hours, until his hands halt over the keys and he is silent.  The shadows in the room have changed stretching with the sun, until it late in the after noon. 

Then there are lips on his own, a hand on his face.  He is pushed back and his hands land on the keys, but there is no discord, only music a tender aching sound, just like this kiss.  He draws back, and he can still taste him in his mouth.  The hand on his face falls to his shoulder.  They sit together on the piano bench, just as the sat on the subway.  

They spend days together.  Sleeping in the dunes, laughing at failed cooking, and drawing seagulls.  Duo looks for bits of sea glass along the beach and he goes with him.  He says the blue pieces reminds him of Heero's eyes. The play the guitar and the piano at night, a symphony of sound for the ocean.  The walk along the beach during sunset, soaking the knees of their jeans, until it reaches the waistband of their pants, and they wander back.  Inside fingers snap button over button and the jeans are left on the floor until morning.  Days are spent like this, nights are spent in the embrace of arms, the warm imprints of hands, an ocean of hair.

He is happy, content.  He walks out on the beach alone leaving footprints that are washed away by the ocean.  The wind stirs his hair, and flutters up the sleeves of his T-shirt.  He curls his toes in the sand.  

When he open the door to his house, he sees the guitar in its case by the door.  Duo is sitting in the window seat looking out at the sea.  His eyes are lost.  He does not know what to say, if he should interupt this picture, or turn and step outside. Again he is reminded of the cold statues in the Art museum far away, but Duo is fire, the tide, the notes that spring off the strings of the violin.  He is a face at a train station, and a boy with lost eyes.  The sea is rushing outside, and it is just one more step.  Then he is there. Duo turns to see him, then lips on lips, a kiss unlike all their other ones, a hand on his shoulder.  Warm fingers that press gently at the nape of his neck, and shared breath.  They are like the notes of the piano and the guitar, mingling rising becoming a melody for the sea, and the crashing tides wash away their mistakes and their faults.  This kiss is a question, a statement, a stitch in their tapestry. Duo's hand goes slack, the mug in that hand spilling its contents over the wood floor. The wind brushes the curtain with light fingers, like the ocean captured in cloth. When they part, he watches him. 

            I love you. 

            I know.  He reaches for his hand again, and presses his mouth to his knuckles, before turning his hand over and kissing the palm.  He takes Heero's hand and pulls him into the room with the piano, and they sit by the window.  He tells him about wandering, about the city and playing the guitar and being lost.  He tells him about seeing a face at Paddington station with eyes just like his.  About seeing people he thought was someone else.  About endless faces, and lost dreams. 

"I'm happiest here, with this ocean, in this house, with you." He smiles and kisses him.

            The ocean roars outside, they sit and he plays the piano. The notes are slow and soft.  His picture is here in this house by the sea.  Afterwords they walk along the beach leaving footprints that will be washed away by the sand.  But their picture is here, together, the ocean reaching up to soak the knees of their jeans, and they are still a little lost, but they are not lonely anymore.  The painter of their faces mixes a new color and brushes it over this picture, and now that stroke that gave their faces loneliness has been repainted into love.  

~Owari~


End file.
